Emma Stone revealed her favorite movie in a recent interview, and it is a classic comedy with a high 95% Rotten Tomatoes score that deserves all the praise it receives. Stone has stretched her acting muscles in various roles, but when it comes to her best performances, she is often part of romantic comedies, often with a slapstick nature to the story. From her starring roles in comedies like Easy A, Superbad, and Crazy, Stupid, Love to horror comedies like Zombieland, Stone is a modern-day comedy star with classic Hollywood sensibilities.

Emma Stone broke out thanks to her appearance in Superbad, and she skyrocketed to fame after that. This led to starring roles in Zombieland, Easy A, and even a comic book role in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. This resulted in Stone picking up some critically acclaimed roles, earning her four Oscar nominations and winning for La La Land and Poor Things. She was also nominated for The Favourite and Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), but never gave up her love of comedies, including her favorite movie, City Lights.

City Lights Is Emma Stone’s Favorite Movie Of All Time

Emma Stone Breaks Down Her Favorite Movies

Emma Stone compiled a list of her favorite movies for Entertainment Weekly and named the film she considered her all-time favorite. Emma broke down 19 movies that mean the most to her, including listing Planes, Trains, and Automobiles as the movie that made her want to start acting. She also listed The Jerk as the first movie she remembers watching and Winona Ryder’s Lydia as the character she most wanted to play. However, she had a different choice for her all-time favorite movie:

“You’ve got to see City Lights. It’s my favorite movie of all time. The last five minutes of that movie will change your life. It changed mine. I realized where every romantic comedy comes from — what everyone is trying to achieve. It’s the most romantic, touching… If I think about it too long, I’ll cry. It’s just so simple.”

City Lights is a film written and directed by Charlie Chaplin and stars the comedy icon in his iconic Tramp role. In the movie, The Tramp falls in love with a blind woman (Virginia Cherrill) and becomes friends with a millionaire with alcoholism (Harry Myers). When looking at Emma Stone’s comedy career, it is obvious she takes a lot of inspiration from silent comedy films where the entire story is told without dialogue, delivering comedy and heartfelt moments with only the actors’ body movements and actions.

Why City Lights Is Still Such An Entertaining Watch

Charlie Chaplin Turned In A Masterclass Performance

There is a lot to love when watching City Lights, almost 100 years since the film hit theaters. The movie is so beloved that critics and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes sit at 95% fresh. While the entire story is touching, the love story between The Tramp and the blind girl is so heartfelt that the film’s climax pays off everything that happens in the movie to that point. City Lights has one of the best endings in any comedy movie, silent or otherwise, when The Tramp meets up with the woman once again, and she has finally regained her eyesight and really sees him for the first time.

Emma Stone mentions that the film brings her to tears when she watches it, and even without much context, the final moment when the woman and the Tramp look each other in the eyes is one of the most emotional scenes in Hollywood history. The film’s legacy is so great that the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1991, and the American Film Insтιтute named it one of the best American films ever made.

Like many of Emma Stone‘s favorite movies, Charlie Chaplin created something special with his best releases, City Lights and Modern Times. He showed that The Tramp wasn’t a basic unhoused individual but a regular man society let down. In both cases and especially in the final moments of City Lights, he proves to be a good man who strives to be better and is responsible for helping other people’s dreams come true, even over his own well-being. City Lights did everything a quality comedy should do, and no one did it better than Charlie Chaplin.

Source: Entertainment Weekly, Rotten Tomatoes, American Film Insтιтute